Practice & songwriting
How do you write your own exercises over a chord progression?
Jean-Marc Perc · · Length 2:39
Most of the exercises you actually need are in no book: one particular figure over one particular progression, at your own tempo, with your own notes. Sequence Mode is where you draw exactly that onto the fretboard shape – and then push it onto every chord of your progression in one step, where it adapts itself.
What is Sequence Mode?
You select a chord and switch into Sequence Mode. One small thing happens that makes the difference while writing: the previous selection does not disappear, it just drops back at lower opacity.
So your reference point stays visible. You are not drawing on an empty grid but into the shape the exercise comes from – and you can see the whole time which notes belong to the chord and which do not.
How do you draw your own sequence?
You pick a note value and draw it straight onto the shape, step by step: exactly the rhythm and exactly the notes you want. That makes the sequence more than a run of pitches – it is a rhythmically fixed exercise, and being rhythmically fixed is the difference between “I play the scale up and down” and an exercise that actually trains something.
Write it once, apply it everywhere
Here the same mechanic returns that edits chords in the Chord Progression Module: multi-editing. You can copy your sequence onto every selected chord at once.
And crucially, it adapts as it goes. Write a diatonic sequence a single time on one chord and copy it across, and it is immediately fitted to every other chord in the progression – not the same frets stubbornly repeated, but the same figure in the right place each time.
Two minutes of work turns into an exercise across a whole progression. By hand, an eight-bar sequence would mean drawing the same thing eight times, with eight chances to get it wrong.
Reading notation and tab as you write
Alongside the sequence you can open the notation or tab view, and it updates while you draw. So you see what you have built straight away – in real notation, not just as dots on a grid.
For anyone who wants to hand their exercises on or keep them, that is the point where an idea becomes something readable. How to capture, organise and share those results is the next tutorial.
In short
- The previous selection stays visible at lower opacity – you never lose your reference point while writing.
- You pick a note value and draw the sequence step by step straight onto the fretboard shape.
- A sequence written once can be copied onto every selected chord, adapting itself to each one.
- Notation and tab views update live as you draw.
More about this module: Practice with structure →
Full transcript of the video
Let's talk about Sequence Mode — one of the most powerful functions of SMART FRET.
Let's start with a chord — I'll select one, and now I click into SEQ. Watch what happens — my previous selection drops down to a lower opacity in the background, so I always still see my original reference point while I build.
Now I can draw my own sequence. I pick a note value, and I draw it straight onto the shape — step by step, exactly the rhythm and notes I want.
And here's where it gets really powerful — remember multi-editing from the CPM? Same idea here. I can take this sequence and copy it onto every chord I've selected at once. So say I write a diatonic sequence just one time, on one chord. I copy it across, and it instantly adjusts itself to fit every other chord I already built in the CPM. Write it once, apply it everywhere.
While I'm writing all this, I can also pop open the tab or notation view right alongside it — and it updates straight away as I draw, so I can see exactly what I'm building in standard notation, not just on the grid.